Chapter 5. KVM Paravirtualized (virtio) Drivers

Paravirtualized drivers enhance the performance of guests, decreasing guest I/O latency and increasing throughput almost to bare-metal levels. It is recommended to use the paravirtualized drivers for fully virtualized guests running I/O-heavy tasks and applications.

Virtio drivers are KVM's paravirtualized device drivers, available for guest virtual machines running on KVM hosts. These drivers are included in the virtio package. The virtio package supports block (storage) devices and network interface controllers.

5.1. Using KVM virtio Drivers for Existing Storage Devices

You can modify an existing hard disk device attached to the guest to use the virtio driver instead of the virtualized IDE driver. The example shown in this section edits libvirt configuration files. Note that the guest virtual machine does not need to be shut down to perform these steps, however the change will not be applied until the guest is completely shut down and rebooted.

Procedure 5.1. Using KVM virtio drivers for existing devices

Ensure that you have installed the appropriate driver (viostor), before continuing with this procedure.

Run the virsh edit guestname command as root to edit the XML configuration file for your device. For example, virsh edit guest1. The configuration files are located in the /etc/libvirt/qemu/ directory.

Below is a file-based block device using the virtualized IDE driver. This is a typical entry for a virtual machine not using the virtio drivers.

Change the entry to use the virtio device by modifying the bus= entry to virtio. Note that if the disk was previously IDE, it has a target similar to hda, hdb, or hdc. When changing to bus=virtio the target needs to be changed to vda, vdb, or vdc accordingly.

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